Quality of Taiwan Chinese Language Education vs. Mainland

[lilongyue]

Various aspects of the study in Taiwan vs. China question have come up many times in different posts, but none of them have talked much about this aspect of the question. So, I'm hoping that there are some people who have experience studying Chinese both in Mainland and Taiwanese universities. If there are, here are my questions:

1) Quality of materials in Taiwan. How applicable to real life was the vocabulary you learned? Were there many outdated words? How interesting was the content of the materials? Were you reading endless stories about being a foreign student in Taiwan? Or about how wonderful the Taiwanese people are to foreigners? I am sick to death of reading these BS stories that are in my books. If I read yet another fantasy story about how kind Mainland Chinese people are to foreigners (which is only about 10% true), I think I'm going to puke. What were you taught about the Chinese characters? Was the radical system taught? Was it done in a way that benefited you?

2) Quality of teaching. How many of your teachers were in fact student-teachers? For nearly every class but grammar, all of my teachers are student-teachers. Some of them don't know how to teach Chinese to foreigners, they don't know what it's like learning Chinese as a second language. If you don't do your homework, do you have to sing a song in front of the class? Do they play these silly, childish games in Taiwanese language courses? How much memorization do you do? This semester my tingli teacher decided that because one of the "best" high schools in Hangzhou does massive amounts of memorization, we would too. I've become quite familiar with the Mainland Chinese approach to education, and so wasn't too surprised when I heard this, but it's a tremendous waste of time. It is supposed to be tingli, not memorize-and-repeat class. I was also blown away when my tingli teacher said, perhaps as a justification of time spent reciting sentences, that our tingli final exam score wasn't important. In a way she's right, you can all but fail a class and still go on to the next level, but what am I spending my money on? Oh yeah, the recordings we listen to are on old cassette tapes with terrible sound quality. Taiwan? Do teachers take the time in class to cover material that students have questions about? Or do the teachers in Taiwan simply race to follow the schedule laid out for them, student comprehension be damned? My grammar teacher this semester gets upset if I ask her more than 2 questions about some new bit of grammar she didn't explain clearly.

3) Quality of facilities. I'm attending Zhejiang University, one of the top five universities in China, but sit on these ancient, painfully uncomfortable benches, in a classroom where parts of the ceiling fall off during class due to some kind of ongoing water damage. Last years final exam was held in a room with what looked like mould growing all over the walls. I was wondering where the tens of millions of RMB foreign students are spending went, until I remember that there is a brand spanking new campus down the road (that's for the Chinese students). What are the facilities like in Taiwan for the foreign students enrolled in the Chinese language program?

Because I'm on a tight budget, if I were to go to a Taiwanese university to study, it would most likely be one like the Taipei Normal University's Mandarin Training Center. Their tuition is about the same as Zheda (about $1,000 USD a semester). Actually, now that I think about it, my tuition has been going up, due to the appreciating Yuan.

[rezaf]

Maybe your university is not a good place for learning chinese. I study in Shanghai and pay 9000rmb each semester. Our university is new, the campus is beautiful and the chairs are comfortable. Our teachers are not students. Some of them are good and some of them are 还可以. There are about 12 to 15 students in each class. We study BLCU books and I think that they are neither creative nor interesting. We also should sing in the class which seems to amuse a lot of students but not me. The only class that I have problem with is kouyu, and as a result I pay a Chinese student 25rmb an hour to teach me kouyu. I also think that teaching methods in China are not very good but I don't think that learning enviornment is that bad in China. It is much more expensive in Taiwan and don't forget that their putonghua accent is different.

[Lu]

Can't answer all your questions, but I can give you a bit of info.

I studied at Shida's MTC, where you're planning to go. The vast majority of teachers are of high quality, I heard there are some who are less good. In the beginning of the semester, you pick a class, but you have a week to change classes as often as you like if you don't like your class, for whatever reason (don't like the teacher, level too easy/hard, whatever). There are some student-teachers, but I think they only teach a few classes (few hours) each semester, so most of the time you'll have a professional teacher.

As to what I've seen, study material is about many subjects. I studied news reading, and we read about the weather and Lin Huaimin and politics and a lot of other subjects. (On a sidenote, Taiwanese people are really nice, but we don't get to hear about that in textbooks ad nauseam.) I already knew everyday Chinese when I got there, but fellow students told me what they learned in lower levels was immediately useful in everyday life. The school does tend to teach norther Mandarin, so you learn all kinds of -er that you'll never hear outside the classroom, but that's not really a major issue.

Facilities are fine. Nothing falling apart, clean enough. As well as you can expect of a school that is in intensive use all day. Foreign students rarely live on campus, so how your living environment is is up to you. Classroom furniture is fine, nothing ancient or backbreaking as I recall.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[wix]

All the Chinese teachers I have had in Taiwan have had years of experience. In practice this means they are competent and know what they are doing, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are great teachers. Learning Chinese is hard work. Having a good teacher can make it more fun and enjoyable, but ultimately how well you learn comes down to the effort you put in.

I think Lu's advice above is good. At Shi-Da sit in on several classes during the first week and find a teacher that you like. Also ask other students who have studied there for a few semesters who the good teachers are. A reason to chooses Shi-Da above other schools in Taiwan is not necessarily that the quality is any better, but there are more teachers and classes to choose from.

I have never formally studied Chinese in China so I can't make any comparisons with what is on offer there.

[kaifaqu crue]

I'm currently studying full-time at Fo Guang University in Yilan, Taiwan. I studied for a semester at Liaoning University in Shenyang in 2002.

Last semester I used Far East Everyday Chinese 3 (in my group class) and the Newspaper Readings I book published by Shida that Lu talked about (in my 1-on-1 class).

I thought the Far East book was great. Each chapter has two texts: one focused on spoken Chinese (a dialogue) and one focused on written Chinese (an article). Both texts are accompanied by a vocab list of about 40-50 words and 7 or 8 grammar patterns.

The topics of each chapter range from business, internet, the Asian financial crisis, history, social issues etc. The material isn't the whole "here's a story of a good foreign student who gets back to his dorm by 11pm" that I found in the books I used in Shenyang. One of the dialogues (titled "a particular social phenominon") is between a mother, a police officer, and the teenage daugher who's been picked up after a raid on a nightclub/KTV place. ("But mom! They said I could make NT$1000 an hour just for talking!!")

The Newspaper Readings book is alright, but it's pretty out of date (published in 2000, articles about Chen Shui-Bian getting elected for the first time), the print quality of the latest publishing is pretty bad, and there are quite a few errors/omissions between versions. Still, the vocabulary is valuable, especially if you're really interested in learning how to read, and you're supposedly reading published newspaper articles, though some of the articles had been changed slightly from the earlier version my teacher was using. The layout of the chapters is similar to the Far East book (two readings per chapter with accompanying vocab and grammar patterns).

These are both relatively advanced books, so there's little discussion of radicals and things like that, as you're assumed to have already learned about them. I'm not sure about how the earlier books in the Far East series deal with them.

I've found the quality of the program here to be very high, which is due to both the teachers and the class sizes. My full-time study program involves a "group" class for 12 hours a week, individual class for 4 hours a week, and four hours a week of calligraphy and painting. In my case, the group class is only two students and the largest group class I know of at the school is 4.

The teachers are very professional and flexible as far as focusing on what we want to learn, answering our questions, etc. For example, my classmate and I weren't that interested in studing the last several chapters in the Far East book (dealing with Chinese pottery, poetry, etc.), so we spent the last 4 weeks of the semester watching Eat Drink Man Woman, going through the script and practicing the new vocab and grammar (there was a lot).

They treat us like adults, so if you don't do your homework, they treat it as you wasting your tuition money instead of making you sing or anything like that. They tend to grade the tests really hard, especially the writing portions. This was a bit stressful for me at first, as I'm on a scholarship that requires me to maintain an 85 average, but it did get me to study a lot harder.

We do tingli (listen to the teacher read a 20 character sentence twice and then write it down), which can be annoying as memorizing how to write the 100 or so words per chapter takes a long time and I had never studied traditional characters before I got here. However, this really makes you focus more on understanding the sentence you hear than just memorizing how to write the characters and writing them one by one as you hear them, which for me is pretty much impossible, because I can't write that fast.

Facilities are pretty much brand new.

Comparing this experience with my experience in China is a little difficult, as I was at a completely different point in my study of Chinese then, but overall I feel like the quality of education here at Fo Guang is far far better than what I received at Liaoning Normal. Of course, it's a lot more expensive here (US$4000 a semester), but you really get what you pay for, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, I don't know how all of these things that I've described would differ at a cheaper school like Shida, so this may not be that much help as far as your specific situation, but it might be of interest to others with more resources available to them.